In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.
At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who alway...
Repression is Justine's whole being - repression of sex, of anger and of her own violence; the repressions demanded of Christian virtue, in fact.
The perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.
It was a sensitive and musical dog.
Those were her best days, although there was always something feckless about her, something so slack and almost fearful in her too frequent smile, so that when you saw Mignon being happy, you always t...
To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.
And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trick...
Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.
My father lost me to the Beast at cards
It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.
To obtain his precious orgasm, the libertine must now hunt it down single-mindedly through seas of blood and excrement.
But I do not want to paint our circumstantial portraits so that we both emerge with enough well-rounded, spuriously detailed actuality that you are forced to believe in us. I do not want to practise s...
Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them.
Eldritch ways,
She looks wonderful, but she doesn't look right.
Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment!
Fish in the sea are luminous so that they can recognise one another; might not men and women also exude some kind of speechless luminescence to those akin to them?
Sin and contraception aside, anal intercourse has an egalitarian lure for Sade. If sexual relations are implicitly political in Sade, the sexual act, among equals, is one of mutual if sequential domin...
I understand,' said Melanie. An ancient, female look passed between them; they were poor women pensioners, planets round a male sun.